Lord & Schryver

Pioneer Information

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Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver practiced landscape architecture together in Salem, Oregon, from 1929 to the 1970s. Their firm was the first office of professional women landscape architects on the West Coast.

Elizabeth Lord was born in Oregon in 1887, and Edith Schryver in Kingston, New York, in 1901. They met as students at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts. Their residential work was influenced by the work of other women designers, particularly Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Shipman, and Louise Beebe Wilder. Designing more than 250 residential gardens in the Pacific Northwest, their work is characterized by an architectural arrangement of spaces and garden rooms that incorporate a relaxed, western attitude conducive to outdoor living.

In addition to residential work, they consulted for Salem's Park Commission, Tree Commission, Art Association, and the Oregon Roadside Council and Capitol Commission. Each also wrote for the Oregonian and lectured both on radio and at Oregon State Agricultural College.